December 3, 2016

’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the office not a creature was stirring … except for the compliance auditors finishing up their yearly CIS audits.

Ahh, poor them. This holiday season, wouldn’t you love to give your security and compliance team a little holiday cheer? Wouldn’t you love to see a bit of peace, joy, and empathy across organizations? I was lured into technology by just that concept, and I want to share a little holiday cheer by telling you my story.

I’m totally new to technology, having made a pretty big leap of faith into a career change. The thing that attracted me to technology was witnessing this display of empathy firsthand. My husband works for a large company who specializes in point-of-sale software, and he’s a very effective driver of DevOps within his organization. He was ready to move forward with automating all of the things and bringing more of the DevOps cheer to his company, but his security and compliance team was, in his eyes, blocking his initiatives - and for good reason!

My husband’s year-long struggle with getting his security and compliance team on board with automation was such an interesting problem to solve for me. He was excited about the agile and DevOps methodologies that he had adopted and how they would bring about greater business outcomes by increasing velocity. But the security and compliance team was still understandably hesitant, especially with stories of other companies experiencing massive data breaches in the news with millions of dollars lost. I would remind my husband that they were just trying to do their jobs, too. The security and compliance folks aren’t trying to be a grinch. They’re just doing their job, which is to defend, not to intentionally block.

So I urged him to figure out what they needed and wanted (ENTER: Empathy). And what he realized is that they needed to understand what was happening with the infrastructure. I can see how all of the automated configuration management could have caused a bit of hesitation on behalf of security and compliance. They wanted to be able to inspect everything more carefully and not feel like the automation was creating vulnerability issues that were out of their control.

But the lightbulb turned on when they realized that they could code their compliance controls with a framework called InSpec. InSpec is an open-source framework owned by Chef but totally platform agnostic. The cool thing about it is that you don’t even need to have configuration management to use it, which makes it a great introduction to automation for those that are new to DevOps or any sort of automation.

(Full-disclosure: Neither of us works for Chef/InSpec; we’re just big fans!)

You can run it locally or remotely, with nothing needing to be installed on the nodes being tested. That means you can store your InSpec test profile on your local machine or in version control and run it from the CLI to test your local machine or a remote host.

The security and compliance team’s fears were finally allayed. All of the configuration automation that my husband was doing had allowed him to see his infrastructure as code, and now the security and compliance team could see their compliance as code, too.

They began to realize that they could automate a huge chunk of their PCI audits and verify every time the application or infrastructure code changed instead of the lengthy, manual audits that they were used to!

Chef promotes InSpec as being human-readable and accessible for non-developers, so I decided to learn it for myself and document on my blog whether or not that was true for me, a non-developer. As I learned it, I became more and more of a fan and could see how it was not only accessible, but in a very simple and basic way, it promoted empathy between the security and compliance teams and the DevOps teams. It truly is at the heart of the DevSecOps notion. We know that for DevOps to deliver on its promise of creating greater velocity and innovation that silos must be broken down. These silos being torn down absolutely must include those of the security and compliance teams. The InSpec framework does that in such a simple way that it is easy to gloss over. I promise you, though, it doens’t have to be complicated. So here it is…metadata. Let me explain.

If you’re a compliance auditor, then you’re used to working with PDFs, spreadsheets, docs, etc. One example of that is the CIS benchmarks. Here’s what a CIS control looks like.

And this is what that same control looks like when it’s being audited using InSpec. Can you see how the metadata provides a direct link to the CIS control above?

control "cis-1-5-2" do
impact 1.0
title "1.5.2 Set Permissions on /etc/grub.conf (Scored)"
desc "Set permission on the /etc/grub.conf file to read and write for root only."
describe file('/etc/grub.conf') do
it { should be_writable.by('owner') }
it { should be_readable.by('owner') }
end
end

And then when you run a profile of controls like this, you end up with a nice, readable output like this.

When security and compliance controls are written this way, developers know what standards they’re expected to meet, and security and compliance auditors know that they’re being tested! InSpec allows them to speak the same language. When someone from security and compliance looks at this test, they feel assured that “Control 1.5.1” is being tested and what its impact level is for future prioritization. They can also read plainly how that control is being audited. And when a developer looks at this control, they see a description that gives them a frame of reference for why this control exists in the first place.

And when the three magi of Development, Operations, and Security and Compliance all speak the same language, bottlenecks are removed and progress can be realized!

Since I began my journey into technology, I have found myself at 10th Magnitude, a leading Azure cloud consultancy. My goal today is to leverage InSpec in as many ways as possible to add safety to 10th Magnitude’s Azure and DevOps engagements so that our clients can realize the true velocity the cloud makes possible.

I hope this sparked your interest in InSpec as it is my holiday gift to you! Find me on Twitter @anniehedie, and find much more about my journey with InSpec and technology on my blog.